The worst book title and more: Some random links

You’ve got to be kidding! A catchy title is as crucial as a well-designed cover to grab a book browser’s attention of book browser in those first few seconds of scanning a store’s shelves.

And just as there are some awful cover designs, there are some pretty bad titles out there.

The winner of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution book blog’s "World’s Worst Book Title" contest is a 1995 book published by Mouse Works called--that's right--"Cooking with Pooh."

Is it possible--did someone miss that yucky double entendre? Or did they think it was really cute? Among the runner-up titles (actually published) is "The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification" (2006) (Abrams Image).

You can read a longer list, plus public reaction, at the newspaper’s website. The contest asked for submissions of real and fake titles, which is too bad. It’s much more surprising to learn about real books (such as "Cooking with Pooh") that had a manufacturing/marketing push behind them; some of the invented ones--for instance, "Letting Go: A History of American Incontinence--are just silly.

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A Native American Thanksgiving: The new winter issue of Parabola magazine explores the theme of Old Worlds/New Worlds with a rich variety that is characteristic of this fine publication. Among the pieces are a recent interview with Sufi leader Pir Zia Inayat-Khan, new poems by Mary Oliver and a 2002 excerpt of Pope John Paul II extolling the evangelical value of the Internet. A particularly poignant article comes from Jacqueline Keeler, a commentator with Pacific News Service and a member of the Dineh (Navajo) nation. She explains why she embraces Thanksgiving and the encounter between the starving Pilgrims and Squanto, a Wampanoag man, who found and helped them. It is less about the meal, she says, and more about making a moral effort to confront the bitter mistreatment of her ancestors in the years after that first meeting so that "the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle. And the healing can begin."

Nick Owchar